A garden that broke hearts, won Oscars, and now tourists can't find it.
Once upon a time there was a garden, a refuge, a safe haven - 'The Garden of the Finzi Continis'. It came to life in Giorgio Bassani's 1962 semi-autobiographical novel recounting an unfulfilled love story between two young Jews in Ferrara, while fascism was raging in Italy in the late 1930's. In 1972, Vittorio De Sica's film adaptation of the book won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Since then, the fictional space of the garden became so tangible that people from all over the world come to Ferrara to look for it. Fifty years after winning the Oscar, reality and fiction come together once more, as we walk through an imaginary garden and bring to life the book, its author, its main protagonists, history, love, friendships and betrayals.
Direction
Rä di Martino weaves fiction, documentary, and ghost-hunting with poetic restraint.
Production
The actual search for a place that never was — devastatingly simple concept.
Director
Rä di Martino
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
The Finzi-Continis became so real that Ferrara's tourism board fields weekly requests for directions to a nonexistent estate.
De Sica filmed in a real villa, but the garden itself was largely constructed — this documentary returns to that location, now crumbling, making the fiction feel even more ghostly.
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